# Is Computer Self-Awareness Possible **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 22, 2011, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-computer-self-awareness-possible/582787 "2011-05-22T17:20:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 71
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2011, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-computer-self-awareness-possible/582787/71 "2011-05-24T13:10:31Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Yes. It’s just like flight; the existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was possible centuries before we had any idea how to pull it off. Yes, and to future generations, denying that possibility will probably seem as silly as Lord Kelvin’s infamous statement about the impossibility of heavier than air flight seems to us now. I mean, did that man just never see birds? > [@Dissonance](#): > > Yes. A computer is never going to have an original thought - or any thought for that matter. It will only ever do what it has been programmed to do, no matter how complex that may be. Computers are perfectly capable of originality even now. Just think of genetic algorithms’ ability to find novel solutions to appropriately posed problems through self-selection, or think of [computer-composed music](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_music), or hell, think of the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, which reportedly was designed by one of Stephen Thaler’s [Creativity Machines](http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2004/Creativity-Machine-Thaler24jan04.htm)… > [@tim314](#): > > I have direct awareness of my own sentience, but as far as I know everyone else in the world could merely be an automaton who both perfectly duplicates the appearance of sentience, and falsely reports having direct awareness of their own sentience, without actually having it. So could your brain, though, falsely reporting its own sentience to itself. Yes, that’s circular, but not any more vicious than, say, a river carving its own bed, which in turn directs its flow, or the gravitational field being a source of the gravitational field. Just think of a p-zombie computer, a zombot, that outwardly has all the capacities of a human being, i.e. it would pass any test for consciousness you might confront it with, provided a human can, too. Now add a second zombot, and have the first zombot examine it for consciousness – which it of course can do as well as any human. Naturally, the first zombot will judge the second one conscious. But now, just connect the first zombot’s output to its input, and have it examine itself for consciousness – what’s gonna happen? Well, since as a zombot, it is able to perfectly pass any test for consciousness, it will obviously judge itself to be conscious. And in the end, that’s all you’re doing, too – judging yourself conscious. You can model the process of introspection as asking yourself questions about being conscious; the mental content you experience is generated by and represented as the set of answers to these questions. So, in fact, if you can build a zombot, you can build a ‘truly’ conscious computer just as well; or at least, something that’ll believe itself to be one. And in the mind, what you believe is what _is_: you can’t merely _believe_ to experience, say, a headache, for that belief is indistinguishable from the experience. > [@Mangetout](#): > > Occam’s Razor, really - things tend to be as they appear, and when that appearance is hugely multifaceted, the tendency is multiplied. I may have to steal that line at some point… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-computer-self-awareness-possible/582787)._